Five Nights in Paris by John Baxter

Five Nights in Paris by John Baxter

Author:John Baxter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2015-03-03T05:00:00+00:00


The Marais churns. It always has. Though shops with signs in Hebrew bolstered its image as the Jewish quarter of Paris, that was fading fast. Gay culture has displaced many old delis and cafés. Laundromats are now get-fit centers, offering steam rooms and “happy ending” massages. Every maison de presse displayed the beefcake covers of the gay glossy Têtu. Bookshops flaunted images of washboard stomachs and jutting jockstraps. The largest bookseller in the Marais is Les Mots à la Bouche—literally, “words in the mouth,” a pun on l’eau à la bouche—mouthwatering—and the perfect encapsulation of the district’s prevailing sense: appetite. This is the city that kisses. Perfumeries scented the air with fragrances as the young and beautiful, flawless as shop window mannequins, prowled the narrow sidewalks. Everywhere, people ate as they walked, licking their fingers, holding hands, acknowledging that here the sense of touch reigned supreme.

To many, these sticky fingers and fumbling hands clashed with the district’s synagogues and museums commemorating the dead of Auschwitz, but they were in the minority. No stranger to diaspora, the Jews of the Marais are once again on the move. The closing of Joe Goldenberg’s, oldest and most respected of the Marais’s deli restaurants, marked the end of an era. Edmund White found it “wonderfully cozy with its steaming bowls of chicken soup and dumplings and its goulash and poppy seed cake, its strolling gypsy violinists and palm readers, its pair of lazy, over-fed dogs and its floor-to-ceiling paintings of rabbis in their prayer shawls or of near-Chagall blue pigs and flying musicians.” Sufficiently rugged to survive a 1982 attack by Arab terrorists in which a number of people died, Goldenberg’s suffered more insidious assaults from the Bureau de Santé on its standard of hygiene. These proved more lasting and, in time, fatal.

Though a handful of Jewish bakeries still survive along rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie and rue des Rosiers, fewer offer traditional challah and strudel. The clientele has migrated to the two branches of LegayChoc, whose big sellers are bread rolls and jam tarts shaped like hefty genitalia. And Louise smiled at a sign outside the confectionery Les Paris Gourmandes on rue des Archives.

“It says they sell coucougnettes.”

“So?”

“It means ‘testicles.’”

Inside the tiny shop, smelling of chocolate and vanilla, the vendeuse, straight-faced, explained that the fuzzy pink spheroids were a typical confection of the south, made from almond paste molded around chocolate. We left with a glassine bag filled with them, just the thing to pass around with coffee at the next dinner party.

Louise abandoned me for an hour to rummage in the melee of Free’P’Star, one of Paris’s growing roster of fripperies and dépôts-ventes—secondhand clothing stores. A poster on its door advertised Décors de Bordels, an exhibition of brothel photos being held opposite the old premises of Le Chabanais, once Paris’s most luxurious whorehouse. Tempting though this was, I decided to spend the time at the truly weird but utterly French Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature.

Supposedly devoted to hunting and nature, the museum celebrates animals through the joy of slaughtering them.



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